A 15-year-old case yields a timely clue in deadly thallium poisoning

Patti Sapone/The Star-LedgerTianle "Heidi" Li of Monroe, left, is arraigned on murder charges Wednesday. Li and her attorney Steve Altman, right, listen to the assistant prosecutor. She is accused of murdering her estranged husband, Xiaoye Wang, by poisoning him with thallium.

MONROE — In April 1995, two college undergraduates in China posted a message on the internet:

"Hi. This is Peking University … A young 21-year old student has become very sick and is dying … Doctors at the best hospitals in Beijing cannot cure her … So now we are asking the world — can somebody help us?"

Their friend, Zhu Ling, a chemistry student, was suffering stomach pain and hair loss and was slowly becoming immobilized. The paralysis had spread up into her diaphragm and was now preventing her from breathing. If the cause wasn’t found soon, she would probably die.

More than 2,000 people around the world heeded the call for help, and a graduate student and professor in the department of radiological sciences at UCLA reviewed the replies and came up with an answer: thallium poisoning.

Ling’s doctors tested their patient, confirmed the diagnosis and administered the only known antidote, Prussian blue, according to international news accounts. Ling survived, but was left with permanent neurological damage and severe cognitive deficits.

The case was widely publicized in China. Police questioned one of Ling’s roommates, but no one was ever charged.

That same year, Tianle Li, who today sits in a North Brunswick jail charged with fatally poisoning her husband, graduated with a degree in chemistry from Tshingua University, which is in the same Beijing neighborhood as Peking University.

It is impossible to know if Li knew about the Ling case, but a nurse at University Medical Center in Princeton remembered it last month, according to Steven Marcus, medical and executive director of New Jersey Poison Control.

Although authorities have refused to release the name of the nurse, it was she who suggested testing Li’s then-critically ill husband for thallium poisoning. The results were positive, but the rush to save Xiaoye Wang’s life ultimately proved futile.

Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Nicholas Sewitch confirmed last week that Wang was given a "lethal, massive" amount of thallium.

Sprinkled on food or dissolved in liquid, thallium has been called the "poisoner’s poison" and "inheritance powder." It’s been dusted on doughnuts, cakes and protein shakes; dissolved in bottles of cola and beer; poured into cups of tea and glasses of vodka; and found in saltshakers, candy canes and boxes of chocolate.

Thallium is a rare, nondescript heavy metal, and it is what prosecutors say Bristol-Myers Squibb chemist Li allegedly used to kill her husband.

Li, who has a 2-year-old son by Wang, remains in jail in lieu of $4.15 million bail. Her attorney, Steven Altman, says he plans to file motions Monday for two hearings.

"The bail is extremely excessive," he said. "She wants her child. She has no reason to leave or go anywhere."

The other hearing is for probable cause, to force the prosecutor’s office to "show information that (she) poisoned her husband or have the judge order her released."

While unusual as a murder weapon, thallium has been the tool of choice for everyone from spiteful spouses to heads of state seeking to punish political opponents.

Amnesty International and investigators from the World Health Organization say that thallium was used under Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein to kill hundreds of dissidents.

In 1981, Shawkat Akrawi, an industrial chemist in Iraq, made a surreptitious phone call from a Baghdad hospital to a reporter at New Scientist magazine in Great Britain. He spoke in Kurdish, according to an article the magazine published a short time later:

"The accident they arranged didn’t kill me," Akrawi told the reporter, "so they gave me thallium in the hospital where I am being treated."

Akrawi told the writer, "Say goodbye to everybody." Then the line went dead.

Experts say thallium, which is colorless, odorless and tasteless, is often chosen by the nefarious because it is slow-acting, painful and its wide-ranging symptoms are suggestive of a host of other illnesses and conditions.

"There is a triad of symptoms: gastrointestinal, peripheral neuropathy (nerve damage to the extremities) and hair loss," said Steven Marcus, medical and executive director of New Jersey Poison Control.

Marcus says those who choose thallium as a weapon "tend to be more cowardly than other kind of murderers. Poison puts a distance so the poisoner doesn’t have to be near when the victim dies."

In 1962, a year after Agatha Christie published a thallium-based murder mystery, a British teen named Graham Young used the heavy metal to kill his stepmother and sicken several other family members. Although committed to an institution for the criminally insane, Young was released in 1971 and promptly killed two co-workers and seriously injured two more — all with thallium poisoning. Young was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences, and in 1990 died in prison from a heart attack at age 42.

As recently as 2002, a 61-year-old Long Island woman, Ann Perry, confessed to poisoning her longtime boyfriend by lacing his milkshake with thallium.

In 1997, Joann Curley of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., confessed to authorities she’d killed her husband six years earlier by spiking his daily thermos of ice tea with thallium over nine months.

Before the downfall of apartheid, South African agents had plans to slip thallium into Nelson Mandela’s medication, according to a report from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And last year, a former senior adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat alleged Israeli military agents poisoned Arafat with the heavy metal.

Even the CIA had dreamed up a plot to use thallium to embarrass Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The idea was, according to Senate hearings held in the mid-1970s, to dust Castro’s shoes with thallium so the hair of his legendary beard would fall out.

Thallium is relatively slow-acting, and a lethal dose usually takes almost two weeks to debilitate and kill, according to experts. Symptoms don’t begin until days after the poison is ingested and often start with stomach pain and vomiting.

When Wang was admitted to the hospital in Princeton on Jan. 14, he was scheduled to appear in court with his wife to finalize their divorce. Hours before he became ill, however, he called his lawyer, Michael Green. Wang was distraught, says Green, because he needed to postpone the hearing. His wife’s aunt was suddenly ill and had been taken to the emergency room.

Although Li’s aunt recovered and returned home that day — she later tested negative for thallium, according to Li’s criminal attorney, Altman — a new court date was set for Jan. 27.

But on either Jan. 25 or 26, says Green, he received a call from Li’s divorce lawyer, Frederick Simon, saying Li had just informed him that Wang had been in the hospital since Jan. 14 and the divorce proceedings would again have to be postponed.

"She did not inform my adversary or me that he was sick or passed until the day he died," Green said. "That was shocking to me to say the least."

RETURNS HOME

Patti Sapone/The Star Ledger Tianle "Heidi" Li of Monroe, left, confers with her attorney Steve Altman during her arraignment Wednesday on murder charges. She is accused of murdering her estranged husband, Xiaoye Wang, by poisoning him with thallium.

Although Wang had rented an apartment in Jersey City, he had moved back into the couple’s home in Monroe several months earlier, according to Green, because he "wanted to spend a considerable amount of time with his child."

Green said he had been trying to reach his client by phone for two weeks, but to no avail; only when Simon phoned him and told him there was a story in the newspaper about Wang’s death did he know his client was deceased.

Rich Huang, co-founder of the financial analytics company PolyPaths in Manhattan, and Wang’s boss for the past four years, did not know either.

"On Monday (Jan. 17) he called in saying he was not feeling well and was in the hospital," said Huang. "He got along with everyone in the company. … Everyone is in shock."

Wang is gone, Li is in jail, and the couple’s son, Isaac, is in the care of the Division of Youth and Family Services. When one of the parties dies before a divorce can be finalized in New Jersey, the issue of custody enters what lawyers call a "black hole," said Li’s divorce attorney, Simon.

Last week, the only person answering the door at the couple’s stately home on Stanley Drive in Monroe was Li’s aunt. Speaking in Mandarin, she refused to answer a reporter’s questions.

Li has no other relatives in the United States, according to Simon. She came to America in 1998, he said, married in 2000 and became a citizen in August 2010.

"The issue is whether Mr. Wang’s family (in China) has an interest in pursuing any of the issues that came up in the divorce proceedings," said Simon, because right now, "we’re in the black hole."